‘The Festival of Death’ is a highly ambitious tale for the Fourth Doctor and represents Tom Baker’s take on the Time Lord for BBC Books’ 50th Anniversary Collection.
The wonderful thing about the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary is the upsurge in unofficial publications.
Companions by Andy Frankham-Allen takes an in-depth look at the brave souls who have battled at the Doctor’s side, endured the excitement of time travel and crucially, asked the questions on our behalf.
Pacific Rim: Man, Machines & Monsters delves into the production design of Guillermo del Toro’s epic new movie with lots of exclusive content not usually seen in a book of this type.
Written and read by voice of the Daleks and Big Finish exec Nicholas Briggs, ‘The Dalek Generation’ features the Doctor travelling solo, presumably post-Ponds and prior to ‘The Snowmen’.
Movie novelizations are strange beasts. On one hand, if you’ve seen the film, what would compel you to then read it? And on the other, if you haven’t seen a film yet, why would you want to buy several hundred pages of entertainingly presented spoilers?
Man of Steel: Inside the Legendary World of Superman is the kind of sturdy coffee table book that looks best when casually left open, brazenly revealing one of its many glorious double-page spreads of the film’s pre-production artwork. Or the big photo of Henry Cavill’s bare glistening torso. Hey, it’s all part of the film’s aesthetic appeal.
Terry Nation’s script for the ‘Planet of the Daleks’ was a slice of traditional Doctor Who even in the early 1970s.
Reliant on many of his favourite elements such as inhospitable plant life, biological weapons and people hiding in Dalek casings, it acts as a sequel to his original Dalek tale and has been accused of being little more than a rewrite. We prefer to see it as a homage to those early days of black and white adventure serials.
June’s entry in Doctor Who‘s Destiny of the Doctor series brings us to the Sixth Doctor and ‘Trouble in Paradise’ sees the Time Lord’s most colourful incarnation given a mission by the Eleventh; to collect something called an ‘omni-paradox’ and store its energy for later use. He is also after a coat and seems to regard the Sixth’s outfit as the height of sartorial elegance.
Remember that awful anti-piracy ad from a few years ago? The one The IT Crowd mercilessly parodied, and which still blares at you when you set any 2006-era DVD a-whirring…
Who-ology is fundamentally a giant book of lists and, as such, is ideally suited to the Doctor Who fan market. Face it guys, this is what we do.